The deal could not be good enough, because the liability for breaking their own privacy policy would probably be much larger, not to mention the loss of user trust. Even Facebook does not sell the list.
> Since death is inevitable due to the eventual heat death of the universe, then from an operations research perspective it makes much more sense to focus effort on getting rid of the fear of death than trying to end death itself.
I don’t think that’s true from a global optimization perspective. If you’re trying to maximize contented moments, it makes sense to spend time thinking about how to extend life (assuming you’re talking about the number of happy moments for people who are currently alive), even if those moments still must eventually cease. Because trillions of years of happy moments is a lot more than 80-100 years of happy moments. Only if you’re trying to minimize unhappy moments does removing fear of death become a better goal.
However, from a local optimization perspective, since there is little anyone can individually do about their medium term probability of death, I agree that figuring out how to cope with and minimize that fear is probably the best strategy.
Right, I mean from the individual's perspective, since why should the individual care about optimizing an aggregate the individual will never experience?
it doesn’t really matter what you enjoy if we are talking about what is needed to make a given language faster. That being said, nodejs on v8 is a lot faster than ruby and dynamically typed, so I do agree with your conclusion that static typing is not necessarily the answer.
One of the goals of Ruby 3 is to have a 3x improvement in performance. If you're interested in how Ruby is planning to improve performance, this is a good read: https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3
Getting a bit off topic here, but you sound knowledgeable about Ruby. Ruby is a language I've always admired from afar, but never spent much time trying out. I've read the poignant guide, which was amusing but didn't teach me too much. What's the SICP of Ruby? As in, a high quality book that will teach me the ins and outs of the language.
Ruby is a heavily idiomatic language. It's strongly advised to use rubocop or a similar style guide -- and to temper that with good judgment, at least when it recommends avoiding `!!`.
In addition to the Pickaxe book, I recommend Metaprogramming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta, and potentially the sequel to that book (which I have yet to read).
Ruby lends itself to a very fluid style. One of the things that you may find less common is explicit variable assignment within a method: most of the time your assignment will be in method signatures and block declarations. The following code is illustrative of technique, but not recommended practice:
This generates "non-words", which are guaranteed not to exist in the (Unix) system dictionary, without using explicit assignment. First it creates a (lazy) generator object which yields random "words" of varying length. In Ruby, if you are calling a method with only one argument in an inner loop, you can avoid writing the loop explicitly, which is nice here because it also avoids the performance hit of reading the dictionary file repeatedly. The `method` method lets us pass an object-method pair, to be evaluated later, and the '&' there is a sort of cast-to-block, and you'll see that used in other contexts. So, at that point, we have a lazily-evaluated collection of lazily-filtered strings, and we can take an arbitrary number of these out and print them.
The nice thing about Ruby is that you can probably express what you want in one statement. This does come at the cost of a fair amount of idiom. Some of it is functionally important, some of it is convenient (like using the `*` operator to destructure ranges), and some is pure window dressing, but enforced by convention just the same. The Pickaxe book is better than anything else that I am aware of for describing Ruby idioms. I'm not sure how well it has aged. It's probably recommended to do a lot of pair programming and code review. At times I have mentored others on the website Exercism, and I would recommend that or a similar site.
I had decided against a somewhat stronger statement; I didn't want to bash Pickaxe unnecessarily, particularly as I don't have a lot of better suggestions. I'm fairly inclined to write a book myself to address the situation, but not any time soon.
The V8 team also has the budget to make these kinds of improvements. Browsers are a massive platform, not to mention Node. I don’t expect these changes to come to Python or Ruby soon.
That only matters if the deity in question cares for the cause of your morals. Which surely a class of theoretical deities would, but not all imaginable ones.
I think if you can mostly get over your fear of death that’s greAt, but I’m not sure it is feasible. Fear of death is evolutionarily adaptive like almost nothing else is, so it’s wired in at a pretty deep level.
(You wouldn’t want to entirely escape it —- a little fear is good to keep you from doing stupid thing.)
There are a lot of instances where long married men lose their wives then die very soon afterwards. When there's a correlation of something with longevity and removing the something is soon followed by death, then there's good reason to believe the causation theory.
True for both partners -- usually after one dies the elderly widow/widower tend to have ~5 years or less.
Some of that is just timing, like if the average age of death per the actuary tables is like 79, and your spouse dies at 80, you're statistically going fairly soon as well.
As far as I recall, there were studies showing some causal effect in the behavioral difference of how early things like cancer were diagnosed.
In essence, the average man living with a female partner would get a "nuisance" investigated, diagnosed with cancer, and (sometimes) treated; while the average single man sought treatment only when the condition was truly disturbing, and by that time it's too late to treat the cancer.
I know a fair number of people who had fun, interesting careers in their 20s. But when we talk about investments and saving, they all seem to suddenly realize that time is limited, and if you’re going to trade it for money, it’s best to get as much money for your time as you comfortably can.
As a Googler, Facebook would certainly be a place I would consider if I wasn’t at google. You’re right, of course, that it is a better than fine employer.
That doesn't prove anything though: employee at biggest surveillance machine in the world considers working at the 2nd biggest surveillance machine in the world.
A lot of us software engineering types lack integrity and are perfectly happy to work on socially harmful projects as long as the pay's right and there's opportunity to grow one's skills.
> A lot of us software engineering types lack integrity
This is pretty insulting, working at Facebook doesn't necessarily mean you don't have integrity. The majority of the company is engaged in development efforts that aren't related to the odious part of the business to do with brokering personal data.
Additionally, I'm sure Facebook would move away from that if there was a viable way to get people to pay directly for social media. It's not like they're selling data because they're moustache twirling villains, they're doing it because it's the only business model anyone can make work for social media.
Further, it's interesting how Google is in exactly the same business at Facebook, yet receives a small fraction of public hatred for it.
Working at the company which is responsible for making election manipulation easier, facilitating murders and manipulating billions of people into giving up their private information is not ok, even if one actually works on some cool JavaScript library and not the evil bits themselves.
By this definition, anyone working for any platform that facilitates communication could be responsible for this unless they're policing literally every message, in which case they're grossly violating the privacy of users. This is a ridiculous standard to hold engineering staff against.
No it's not ridiculous. If Facebook is paying you to work on anything, they are getting more value out of you than your salary in their tracking endeavors.
Would you justify working for the Nazis if it was on open source libraries to better enable tracking people?
I've been visiting this website for almost 10 years.
Firstly, only in the past year have Google's or Facebook's reputations taken a turn for the worse. There are critics but there are many more cheerleaders, excuse-finders and whataboutists.
Secondly, this is not an HN bubble thing. Major publications in both the EU and US have written about the damage companies like Google and Facebook do to democracy, society and individuals.
And even if it were an HN bubble, it's about time HN woke up to the malignancy of these corporations.
I don’t work on anything I consider socially harmful, FWIW. Before you ask, I don’t think most people would consider what I do socially harmful either, if they knew what it was.
Whatever you're working on, you're helping Google maintain their dominance and continue their abuse, otherwise you can be pretty sure they wouldn't be paying you for it.
I seriously don't get why Google and Facebook got that brand name. 95% of engineers there are part of the pack and do mainly mindless jobs with very little impact. They are the mot "Sheep-ish" people I know, convinced that working for Google/Facebook give them something to brag at dinner parties.
The top 5 rockstars % (the ones they really want to attract with big money) are the ones taking all decisions.
??? You seem like you’re trying to find a fight here for reasons I cannot fathom. All I think of you as an employee of one of these companies is that you’re probably less well compensated than you could be.
Heh? You can absolutely decide how your house is going to be built and/or refuse to live in a house not built to your standards. Moreover, they certainly have the power to live elsewhere.
Maybe in a magical world where everybody has a great job and plenty of money.
In the real world if an unsafe house exists there will always be someone who is desperate enough to live in it. The only way to stop it is to ban the house, not to rely on market forces.
That's why we have building regulations.
I mean this is obvious really. Suppose there's a house that is cheap and huge and in an amazing location but its wiring isn't up to code and the stairs are steeper than building regs allow. Do you really think nobody would rent it?
Right now I’m talking about property damage, not safety. I would absolutely say that a homeowner who knowingly takes the risk to buy a house with shoddy wiring should bear the risk of that choice (as opposed to the state).
I sure hope the liability laws are not such that PG&E gets wiped out. I don’t think it makes much sense to assign most of the causal weight to a spark when it would do nothing without all that tinder. There would have been another spark, eventually.
If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.
Equipment decades old coupled with IT systems equally antiquated- this is a core problem for all utilities not just PG&E (I would know, I work for one). Unfortunately, I think we can expect more utility faults as well as severe weather that will continue to cause damage to people and homes. Utilities do not invest in IT unless they are incentivized to do so through rate recovery. This has plagued them to fall drastically behind in IT capability and hiring talent, as well as outsourced a majority of their operations (ie. Siemens, ABB, IBM, etc not only provide the solution but are hired to run the project management and strategy). It sucks companies so vital to reliable electricity see IT investment as a balance sheet stop sign but it will not change unless regulators force their hand...
> If you don’t want to sometimes worry about forest fires, don’t build your house in the woods. It isn’t that complicated.
Bushfires in Australia have previously covered more than 10 million acres. Recently people in greek suburbs were literally driven into the sea. It is pretty complicated.
Exceptions to the general rule that fires mostly affect those who live in the woods. Does not affect my assertion that living away from the woods dramatically decreases your risk/worry of being involved in or affected by forest fires.
The SoCal fires this year are not in the woods, so it happens both in the woods (NorCal) and not in the woods (SoCal), and people die and communities are razed both in the woods and not in the woods.
Sure. If there was gross negligence, some liability would be reasonable. Probably not 100% of damages, but some. That’s not what we are talking about though. I think under current law they could be liable even if they took all due care.
PG&E bills literally include a line item for maintenance, beyond the basic costs. PG&E has repeatedly issued bonuses and comp packages funded by cash they received from that line item while not performing maintenance of their network.
This is exactly what happened last year (line that they weren't maintaining caused that fire), and when they blew up san bruno (when a gas line that had even been stated to need maintenance exploded and killed people).
If you can make a profit while doing all the required work, then fair play to you, but if you're turning a "profit" without performing all the maintenance your network requires, and then getting tax payer support whenever that goes wrong you are not running at a profit. You're a tax payer subsidized siphon, taking money from tax payers to fund bonuses and investors. If you can't run a profit without tax payer backup, you aren't profitable.
